Today's Reading: Numbers 30:1-Deuteronomy 1:46
What's in today's reading: Battle, some more rules, and preparing to go home.
So the Midianites were a bad influence on the nation of Israel, teaching them to follow foreign gods. God says wipe them out, so they do. All the men, boys, and women who were not virgins. The virgins, 32 thousand in number, plus the livestock and anything else they wanted, were all theirs.
Why? Why would God do this? Whey would He wipe out an entire people (well, most of them, allowing a pretty large number to be absorbed into Israel)?
These things in the Old Testament scare and confuse me, but it tells me God hates sin. Hates it so much that it was necessary to cut it out of the world.
The rest of our reading is devoted to the final preparations for entering the promised land. Some final directions are given and two tribes offer to settle on 'this' side of the Jordan river, but still promising to help the rest take the land. And then their journey so far is recounted and recorded.
So we're ready to enter the promised land, right? Well, sort of. We end today by getting into the book of Deuteronomy. The word "Deuteronomy" means "second law" - in other words, before we end our 40 years of wandering, we're going to go over everything we've learned along the way. I know, to us who are reading, this might seem like "why are we saying this again", but you have to remember that what took us a few days to read actually took 40 years to write down, so having it all in one place before entering into battle and settling in a new place is a good idea.
So brace yourselves, we're talking about the law.
Tomorrow's Reading: Deuteronomy 2:1-11:32
